Biological Leninism

Bloody Shovel ^ | 14 November, 2018 | Spandrell

[marktwain]

Of course liberal politics kept being a mess. No cohesion in a ruling class which has no good incentive to stick to each other. But of course the incentive is still out there. A cohesive ruling class can monopolize power and extract rents from the whole society forever. The ghost of Lenin is always there. And so the arrow of history kept bending in Lenin’s direction. The West started to build up a Leninist power structure. Not overtly, not as a conscious plan. It just worked that way because the incentives were out there for everyone to see, and so slowly we got it. Biological Leninism. That’s the nature of the Cathedral.

If you live in a free society, and your status is determined by your natural performance; then it follows that to build a cohesive Leninist ruling class you need to recruit those who have natural low-status. In any society, men have higher performance than women. They are stronger, they work harder, they have a higher variance, which means a fatter right tail in all traits (more geniuses); and they have the incentive to perform what the natural mating market provides. That’s the patriarchy for you. Now I don’t want to overstress the biology part here. It’s not the fact that all men are better workers than women. In a patriarchy there’s plenty of unearned status for men. But that’s how it works: the core of society is the natural performance of men; those men will naturally build a society which benefits them as men; some men free-ride on that, some women get a bad deal. Lots of structural inertia there. But the core is real.

[marktwain]

This is a long, extremely well written essay. It explains much of how the dynamics of identity politics work at forging a politically loyal and effective ruling class in the west.

Long, but very much worth reading.

[mjp]

The causal chain that ends up with totalitarian statism starts with the mysticism, collectivism, and statism of Plato, and is intensified with Hegel. This is mixed with the disintegrated mode of thought and nihilism, starting with Kant and intensified with pragmatism. This mixture is incompatible with natural rights, limited government, and capitalism, but is compatible with nazism, fascism, socialism, communism, and Islamic theocracy.

[aspasia]

statism of Plato Plato? Next thing you know God is a totalitarian.